View source for UO:2003-03-17: Changes for the UO Message Board Community

=Changes for the UO Message Board Community=

When we first opened the MyUO forums in the year 2000, our goal was to provide players with a central place to gather and exchange feedback with each other and with developers. Over the last three years, though, we learned that it takes a lot more time to moderate boards than to simply post on them!

As of Wednesday, March 19th 2003, in an effort to spend less time as “the police” and more time on effective communication, we’ve decided to discontinue hosting our own boards, and will now allow that “central place” to be the message boards hosted by one of our oldest and most dedicated UO community sites, UO Stratics.

Anyone who chooses to participate on the UO Stratics boards will need to sign up on the Stratics forums themselves here; we will not be providing players’ UO or MyUO login information to Stratics. To browse the UO Stratics forums and see what they have to offer, head here.

Thank you, and on behalf of the Ultima Online Community Team, we hope to see you there!

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The Online Community Relations (OCR) team here at Origin feels strongly that communication is crucial when running an online game. When we first opened the MyUO forums in the year 2000, our goal was to provide players with a central place to gather and exchange feedback with each other and with developers. Over the last three years, though, we’ve learned that it takes a lot more time to moderate boards than to simply post on them! In an effort to spend less time as “the police” (locking and deleting threads, sending warnings, finding lost passwords, etc.) and more time on effective communication, we’re going to allow one of our oldest and most dedicated fansites, UO Stratics, to handle message board moderation and administration for the Ultima Online forum community on the currently established forums at uo.stratics.com.

So why choose UO Stratics? Well, not only are they part of one of the largest massively multiplayer gaming networks on the web, but they have the most active and established UO community outside of MyUO and a vast set of forums spanning every play style. Some of the benefits of the Stratics forums include:

* a more upgraded version of the same software used for the MyUO forums, with all the features MyUO users are accustomed to
* the ability to bookmark certain threads and posters
* thirty different board color schemes to choose from
* a fully functioning “Who’s Online” page
* a “Dev Post” page showing all posts made by OSI team members
* forums for each profession and each shard
* seventeen general forums, including an ideas forum, an off-topic forum, and yes -- even a rants forum!

In case you’re wondering if this change means that UO or the UO.com website is being scaled back, the answer is a resounding no! Not only has Ultima Online only now reached its all-time high in subscribers, but we have great plans for the future of the Ultima franchise. We are not short on web bandwidth or hardware; this change is specifically geared to free up the Community Team’s time for things that will improve communication, such as reading and responding to players' posts, researching game issues, and writing important news updates. Our time spent on the boards won’t change much – we’ll just be reading the Stratics forums instead of MyUO, and we won’t be spending any time on moderation or administration tasks.

The MyUO Forums will remain open until 2:00 PM Wednesday, March 19th CST to allow players to share their Stratics board names with other posters or make plans to meet friends from MyUO in specific Stratics forums. Anyone who doesn’t already have a Stratics username will need to sign up on the Stratics forums themselves here; we will not be providing players’ UO or MyUO login information to Stratics.

I know this is a lot of information to digest; we invite you to discuss this move in the following threads:

To discuss the move in general, go here.

To share your Stratics name with others on the MyUO forums, go here.